An affiliate instructor or coach can help anyone who is struggling with their affiliate marketing business. An affiliate instructor can’t do the work for you. But they can shine a light on the problems and difficulties you’re facing to help you to overcome them. Problems can come from a lack of understanding, frustration and many other areas. Affiliate marketing isn’t easy and it’s worth getting help for a number of reasons.
Here’s a few problems which affiliates can encounter when starting out. Any one of these can completely derail your affiliate business:
- Lack of a clear direction and focus – procrastination and doubt
- Trust issues and belief – doubt and fear derailing intentions
- Expectations – wanting something for nothing, not knowing what to expect
- Lack of support – family and friends doubting your choices
- Lack of money – affiliate marketing is considerably more difficult without investment in help, support and resources.
- Not getting clear with your intentions – Focus and goal setting
- Choosing a path and sticking to it – not getting shiny object syndrome
- Information overload and overwhelm – Take a step back
- Being a busy fool – wasting time instead of focusing on meaningful activities
- Being stuck in learning mode – watching endless videos but never taking any action to drive your business forwards
- Allowing yourself to get distracted – working at home means prioritising your time and learning good time management skills
Affiliate Instructor
A good affiliate instructor has been where you are right now. They can help you only if you’re ready to be helped. When I started out, I went through many stages of overwhelm, doubt and fear and procrastination. I jumped from one strategy to another many times and didn’t get focused until I saw a clear path which was working for me. This was after many years of struggling!
There’s an expression in the martial arts and zen about an “empty cup”. A student visits a zen master and the zen master pours the tea. He keeps pouring tea until the cup is overflowing. The student exclaims “stop pouring the cup is full”. Whereupon the zen master says “you too are like this cup”. “You are filled with your own ideas and theories. Until you empty your cup, nothing more can be added”.
This is true of affiliate marketing also. With affiliate marketing you need to unlearn preconceived ideas about what it takes to become successful. When I started out I was convinced it should be easy. I though I could have success quickly and that I shouldn’t have to work very hard or for long to achieve it. All of these ideas proved to be wrong!
I also wanted to work in a certain way, which I enjoyed. Unfortunately the strategy I wanted to use wasn’t the best strategy. So I struggled for a long time. See how to earn money through blogging.
Once I let go of some of my preconceived notions, many of which came from marketers in the early 2000’s telling me how easy it was, things began to change. I was able to try new things, and learn from old mistakes.
Affiliate Instructor – Making The Uncomfortable Comfortable
There’s many things you can do online to help you build an affiliate business. You can write blogs, watch information videos, create video content, run advertising, build an email list, create ebooks etc. The list is endless.
Some of these activities will help you and some won’t. It’s important to remember that while you are learning, you should be spending 80% of your time studying and learning and 20% of your time applying. Once you are through much of your learning phase, you should spend 80% of your time implementing and only 20% of your time learning.
It’s a common mistake to confuse learning with implementing. Learning feels good but it’s a wise affiliate who knows when they are caught in learning mode. Don’t become addicted to being a perpetual learner at the expense of actually doing things which move your affiliate business forwards.
The activities which feel good online are often those you gravitate towards. But they are also not necessarily the ones which will put food on the table.
Failing Forwards
Affiliates will fail again and again before they make those sales! Expect to fail many times and learn from these failures. No affiliate who is successful hit a home run on their first swing! They will have tried a number of times and failed over and over. Consider looking at a failure in a different light. Without failure, you cannot progress as an affiliate. But failures are only stepping stones to success. Don’t expect your first email, blog post or advert to make you a millionaire overnight!
Affiliate marketing can bring fantastic rewards. But it is the steady steps forward which pave the way to this kind of success: the first website visitor, the first subscriber to your email list. These are the things to celebrate. A journey of a thousands miles begins with a single step!
Affiliate Instructor – My Mentor
I found an online business/affiliate marketing mentor back in 2014. He created a community of like minded people who are learning how to build online businesses from scratch.
You can access his videos clicking on the image below. In this free video series Stuart explains how the different business models of affiliate marketing work, and which ones are more profitable.
When I first started out as an affiliate I didn’t know about recurring revenue affiliate programs or high ticket affiliate programs. So I just promoted products from the likes of Amazon and eBay. Perhaps you’re doing the same? Little did I know that these sites offered some of the lowest commissions in the industry. Amazon, for example pays between 1% and 11% commissions to its affiliates.
So while I was struggling getting traffic to my websites, what was waiting for me when I finally did was a poor return on all my hard work!
Subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing are a complete game changer in that regard. It still takes time and effort to learn how to drive traffic, depending on the strategy you use. But on the other side of the journey is a much bigger reward than with low value affiliate products which offer tiny commissions. Understanding which affiliate marketing business models pay the most can shave years off the struggle.
Summary
I wish I had found an affiliate marketing instructor years before I did! It would have meant a shorter learning curve. But still I wouldn’t have learned from all the pitfalls if I didn’t fall into them! Here’s a few of the ideas mentioned in this article.
Many of the problems you will encounter with your affiliate marketing business are mental in nature. Get your thinking right and your business will move more quickly and in the right direction. It’s worth educating yourself because it will pay you back over time. Work on the wrong activities, or use the wrong business model and you could be struggling for years.
With affiliate marketing you shouldn’t expect it to work straight away. 95% of affiliates quit far too early. Remember it’s a marathon not a sprint. If you’re not prepared to stick with it for the long term, it may not be the right business for you.
You can access a training and mentorship resource by clicking on the image below. It’s the same community I belong to and you’ll find others on the same journey as you as well as coaches and mentors available to help.
See also affiliate marketing coaches.
Thanks sir,
The article is quite informative.